Murder Party Feature-length
slasher-horror-comedy directed
by Jeremy Saulnier
New York Sneak PreviewA random invitation to a Halloween party leads a man into the hands of a rogue collective intent on murdering him for the sake of their art, sparking a bloodbath of mishap, mayhem and hilarity.

Presented
in partnership with - IFC.com, New York magazine & Automotive
High School.

Murder Party (Jeremy Saulnier| Brooklyn | 1:19:00)
The filmmaker will be present for the screening and
a Q and A after the film.

It’s Halloween night in Brooklyn. Chris, a lonesome
and unremarkable fellow, finds a mysterious invitation
on the street and follows it to what he thinks will
be a fun costume party. It turns out to be a lethal
trap set by a gang of deranged hipster artists. Their
plan is to lure someone to their remote warehouse base
and ritually murder them as part of an extreme artistic
event. It’s all to impress their wealthy and
sinister guru/patron, who soon arrives with promises
of grant money and his dead-eyed henchman. As the booze-and-drug-fueled
night wears on, rivalries within the group flare up
with violent consequences. A body count accrues and
Chris must take advantage of the ensuing chaos if he’s
ever to escape the warehouse and survive the night.

Rooftop Films tends to show quite a few earnest documentaries
about struggling communities in transition and not
so many slasher-comedies about homicidal 20-somethings
plotting to massacre innocent suckers for kicks. For
this reason, some might be surprised to see that we
are screening Jeremy Saulnier’s wantonly wicked
horror comedy, Murder Party. But in its own crazy,
sadistic way, Murder Party is a Rooftop Films film
through and through—it’s very much about
real-life communities, class struggle, gentrification
and disillusionment with modern society’s disregard
for the individual.

It’s just that at the end of this film, people
get acid poured over their heads and are mangled with
power tools in really clever ways.

Set in a factory in Williamsburg just blocks from
the lawn at Automotive High School where it will be
screened on August 3rd, Saulnier’s film is a
spot-on satire of trendy, vapid pop-artists at their
worst. But despite the venom the characters spit at
one another as they plot to kill creatively and win
lucrative grants, Saulnier’s satire is really
something of a homage to Billburg gone stark-raving
mad. The script is so clever, the set-ups so crafted,
the action so well edited, and the actors play their
roles with such obvious relish that it is possible
to see Murder Party not as a social critique, but rather
as a perversely enjoyable (and fittingly ironic) celebration
of the North Brooklyn art scene. There’s something
oddly lovable about even the most despicable of the
wanna-be art stars in Murder Party, and after the film
I bet it will be hard for the audience to resist the
lure of the ‘Burg. I’m willing to bet that
after you are done laughing at your neighbors, more
than a few of you will wander down Lorimer to the open
bar, have a few drinks and and enjoy your time amongst
many of those supposedly despised hipsters until
the G stops running…
Preceded by:Raymond
(Bif | France | 5:00)A hilarious, gorgeous, bizarre special effects
masterpiece directed by the three French geniuses known
collectively as "Bif." This short also tells the story
of a man trapped in a bizarre experiment--in this case
one that involves a a liquid solution that allows scientists
to control his every movement.

Little Farm (Calvin
Reeder | 8:00)
Little Farm tells the shocking tale
of a disjouinted family and their inheritance of a
strange piece of real estate. Intense, eerie imagery
and a haunting soundtrack paint a dark and uneasy portrait
and lead up to a truly shocking, brutal climax.

Music: Nakatomi
Plaza
Right now is a pretty surreal time to be in
a punk band. It seems like these days words like “originality” and “inventiveness” have
been stricken from most bands’ vocabularies,
only to be replaced with “regional Soundscans” and “target
demographics.” It’s ironic, really, that
a subgenre that was initially born out of contempt
for the mainstream culture and brazen capitalism has
turned into a commodity of forced rebellion. Then there’s
Nakatomi Plaza. Formed in New York City, in 1998, the
Brooklyn-based Nakatomi Plaza—guitarist/vocalist
Oscar Rodriguez, Bassist/vocalist Al Fair and drummer
Lou Maiolica—have embodied punk rock’s
DIY ethic via tireless touring and self-promotion for
the past eight years and their third full-length, Unsettled,
is the culmination of their career. Produced by J.
Robbins (Jawbox, Burning Airlines), the album is a
unique amalgam of influences that juxtaposes post-punk’s
angular riffs with virtuosic guitar solos, electronic
flourishes and even the occasional screamo yelp to
create a sound that’s instantly hooked countless
listeners, including Robbins himself.

Book
Drive for Automotive High School
As part of
the their ongoing efforts to improve the educational
environment for their students, this year Automotive
High School is making efforts to substantially expand
their library. Of course, the most important thing in
the library is the books, so if you want to help out
a public high school that is chronically short of funding,
drop off your old books at any Rooftop show
at Automotive High and they will be added to
the library's collection. Pretty much any and every
book is useful, but remember that these are high
school students, so your graduate school text books
might not be that useful to them! But novels, age-appropriate
textbooks, non-fiction and historical books and just
about everything else is very useful and would be much
appreciated.